The Safe Learning Environment in the United Arab Emirates Schools and Its Relationship to the Development of Creative Thinking Among Students

The study aimed to assess the relationship between a safe learning environment in Emirati schools and the development of student's creative thinking. Using a descriptive method with stratified random sampling, the researchers selected a sample of 500 male and female teachers. Two questionnaires were employed: one assessing the safe learning environment (20 items) and another measuring creative thinking (20 items). Results indicated a high teacher perception of a safe learning environment, with statistically significant chi-square values for all items. Similarly, teachers perceived a high level of creative thinking development, with significant chi-square values for all items. Gender and experience did not show statistically significant differences in the perception of a safe learning environment. However, teachers with over 10 years of experience demonstrated higher levels of creative thinking development. Notably, a significant correlation was found between a safe learning environment and the development of students' creative thinking in Emirati schools. This study aligns with the UAE Ministry of Education's mission to create a safe and creative educational system that meets the needs of a globally competitive knowledge society. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-SIED2-014 Full Text: PD

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press